[32] The pleasantest, if not the most important exception to this remark, which I recollect, is to be found in an epistle by the friend of Lope de Vega, Cristóval de Virues, to his brother, dated June 17, 1600, and giving an account of his passage over the Saint Gothard with a body of troops. It is in blank verse that is not very exact, but the descriptions are very good, and marked with the feeling of that stern scenery. Obras, 1609, f. 269. But except these irregular varieties of didactic poetry, we have, for the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nothing to add to what we have already noticed, beyond a repetition of the old forms of epistles and _silvas_, which so frequently occur in the works of Castillejo, Ledesma, Lope de Vega, Jauregui, Zarate, and their contemporaries. Nor could we reasonably expect more. Neither the popular character of Spanish poetry, nor the severe nature of the Spanish ecclesiastical and political constitutions of government, was favorable to the development of this particular form of verse, or likely to tolerate it on any important subject. Didactic poetry remained, therefore, at the end of the period, as it was at the beginning, one of the feeblest and least successful departments of the national literature.[33] [33] The shorter poems, noticed as didactic, are found in the Cancioneros and other collections already referred to, or in the works of their respective authors. CHAPTER XXXII. BALLAD POETRY CULTIVATED: SEPÚLVEDA, FUENTES, TIMONEDA, PADILLA, CUEVA, HITA, HIDALGO, VALDIVIELSO, LOPE DE VEGA, ARELLANO, ROCA Y SERNA, ESQUILACHE, MENDOZA, QUEVEDO.--ROMANCEROS OF MORE POPULAR BALLADS: THE TWELVE PEERS, THE CID, AND OTHERS.--GREAT NUMBER OF WRITERS OF BALLADS. The collection and publication of the popular ballads of the country in the Cancioneros and Romanceros, in the sixteenth century, attracted to them a kind and degree of attention they had failed to receive during the long period in which they had been floating about among the unrecorded traditions of the common people. There was so much that was beautiful in them, so much that appealed successfully to the best recollections of all classes, so much directly connected with the great periods of the national glory, that the minds of all were stirred by them, as soon as they appeared in a permanent form, and they became, at once, favorites of the more cultivated portion of the people, as they had always been of the humble hearts that gave them birth. The natural consequence followed;--they were imitated;--and not merely by poets who occasionally wrote in this among other forms of verse, but by persons who composed them in large numbers and published them by volumes.[34]